Whenever I watch those hoarding documentaries, you know, the ones where people are imprisoned in their own homes by burgeoning ceramic frog collections and old copies of the People’s Friend, I feel huge sympathy.

Lucky for me, I think, I have that annoyingly obsessive need to tidy and straighten. I will never be found dead in a knick-knack-strewn tomb of my own making.

But now I’m not so sure. We are having tiles laid in the kitchen which has forced a long overdue clear out.

Along with the usual: the drawer full of receipts for things long since obsolete and one stuffed with carrier bags, I came to the cupboard in which resides the hopeless purchases grouped under the heading ‘holiday alcohol.’

I swear everyone has one. And if not a full cupboard, then at least a shelf, groaning under the weight of bottles which once chinked their way breezily onto a flight, full of sunny expectation and residual bon homie.

Ours was like a liqueur trip around the globe. There was Limoncello, brought as a gift by my brother after a week in Rome.

We opened it on the night he arrived with it and downed it after dinner, in little rocket-fuel shots. Then we woke up the following morning, feeling like we’d drunk citrus drain cleaner and it hasn’t seen the light of day since.

Likewise the chocolate liqueur which was so sickly my stomach lurches at the memory.

At least they had their seals broken. Not so the ouzo which made its way home after a blissful week in Kefalonia, where we’d drunk it virtually every night, under the stars, while a large gentleman plucked his bouzouki (not a euphemism).

A chilly evening in Aigburth somehow failed to recapture the allure and it remains, to this day, entirely intact.

Worst of all, though, was the coconut milk thing whose origins we couldn’t even recall. That had lived so long in the cupboard, unloved and untouched, it had separated into a thick creamy lump at the bottom and a vile cloudy pool on top.

Neither of us could quite place it, especially since we’ve never been to the Caribbean or anywhere even close. Clearly we had bought it with the intention of making homemade Pina Coladas.

We are not the Pina Colada type.

Husband tried to pour it down the drain but it wouldn’t come out of the bottle. He banged the bottom, like you do with ketchup, but still it was stuck fast. In the end he had to scrape it out with a chopstick.

It was a lesson.

Really, what happens on holiday should stay on holiday. Especially if it’s 70% proof.